1. Technical Field
The technical field relates to a rotary positioning apparatus with a dome carrier, an automatic pick-and-place system and an operating method thereof.
2. Background
Along with the increasing integrity of semiconductor devices in an integrated circuit (IC) day by day, the process accuracy and the production efficiency are considered relatively vital. A slight error in the semiconductor process may lead to the process failure and damage the devices (such as semiconductor or light emitting diode wafer) and therefore waste huge cost.
Taking a thermal evaporation process as an example, the process uses resistors or an electron beam to heat a film-coating material (for example, copper metal) in a crucible to be evaporated so as to reach thin film deposition goal. The method makes a compound evaporated to attach onto the surface of the wafer or a sample's surface through heating.
In consideration of film-coating cost, the most of carriers used by an evaporation equipment is circular-arc type. Currently in the relevant industry however, to pick and place a wafer depends on labour, which requires paying additional training cost. Along with the trend of bigger wafer size (for example, the size of a light emitting diode wafer has increased to 4′-6″ even more) and thinning wafer, the above-mentioned manual pick-and-place way not only costs time, but has risk of damaging the wafer. As an alteration, a mechanical arm can be used to automatically pick and place a wafer, but such a mechanical arm must have multiple freedoms and flexible moving capability so as to reach arc-surface positioning requirement, which increases the design difficulty of the mechanical arm and the configuration cost.